Building energy efficiency regulations (also referred to as “Energy Regulations”) ensure that buildings are constructed in the best interest of future building owners and tenants, as well as in the best interest of the environment. More efficient buildings have lower utility bills and use less fossil fuel. As building energy regulations move to make buildings ever more efficient, the regulations are requiring more sophisticated building components, construction methodologies, operational sequences, system testing, and other elements. Further, building energy regulations themselves are becoming complex. For example, a set of energy efficiency regulations for a particular government jurisdiction can include up to 50,000 provisions.
Because of the complexity of current energy regulations, building departments have difficulty properly enforcing the regulations. The enforcement problem is heightened by constrained building department resources. For example, many building inspectors do not have the time or resources to become well versed in the requirements of building Energy Regulations.
During enforcement of building energy regulations, inspectors allocate their time to different enforcement tasks. To the extent that priorities are made during enforcement, they are often based on the ease of understanding for a given provision and each inspector's particular history with enforcing various provisions. Thus, enforcement of the energy regulations is not consistent. Further, enforcement prioritization is not presently based on energy savings, as the respective energy value of different regulatory provisions is rarely known by building inspectors. Thus, presently, all energy regulation elements are treated as if they are of equal value during the enforcement process.
The haphazard and uneven nature of energy regulation enforcement misses potentially great opportunities for energy savings. Not knowing what is important, inspectors spend too much time inspecting building components and enforcing associated regulations which will have little impact on energy savings and too little time inspecting building components and enforcing regulation which potentially have a great impact on energy savings. In view of the above, new methods and apparatus are needed for enforcing building energy efficient regulations.